Governor General’s literary short list includes vermette, Edwards
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Winnipeg author katherena vermette has made the five-book short list for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Awards for fiction for her novel Real Ones.
Published in September 2024, the novel follows two Michif sisters whose white mother, an artist from whom they are estranged, is exposed as a “pretendian.” vermette won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry in 2013 for her collection North End Love Songs.

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katherena vermette
Also in the fiction category, Ebb and Flow First Nation author Kyle Edwards, now based in California (and formerly a Free Press intern), was named as a finalist for his debut novel Small Ceremonies, which follows the plight of two Indigenous teens in Winnipeg, and their struggling hockey team, over the course of a year.
The drama category also features a number of Manitoba connections. Both Catherine Banks’ Downed Hearts and Tara Beagan’s The Ministry of Grace were published by Scirocco Drama, an imprint of Winnipeg’s J. Gordon Shillingford. Beagan’s play Rise, Red River, also a finalist, was inspired by the 2014 Drag the Red movement in Winnipeg; the play was co-produced by Théatre Cercle Molière, Article 11 and Prairie Theatre Exchange in March 2024
Each of the winning authors (or translators) will receive $25,000; the winners will be announced Nov. 6. For a full list of nominees, see ggbooks.ca.